Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Gradus (Shade’s murderer) contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:

In Memory of Hafid Bouazza

Shade’s murderer, Jakob Gradus (one of the three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization):

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that his daughter called her mother "a didactic katydid:"

                         She twisted words: pot, top

Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."

She called you a didactic katydid.

Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) compares himself to a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava (the capital of Zembla):

Describing his nights at Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that his only contribution to Anglo-American poetry is a dactylic trimeter ‘Ada, our ardors and arbors:’

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), all the hundred floramors (palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world in memory of his grandson Eric) opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875:

At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) compares himself to the shadow of the waxwing:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Ada compares her letter to Van to a document in madness or the herb of repentance:

At the beginning of his Commentary Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade:

VN’s story Lik appeared in the émigré review Russkiya Zapiski in February, 1939, in Paris. The stage name of its title character brings to mind Lika Mizinov (1870-1939), a friend of Chekhov’s family who died on Feb. 5, 1939, in Paris. In a letter of Dec.